Wilts' legacy

SUNDAY SHOWCASE

Wilts C. Alexander Jr. was a pioneer, leader and crusader for Florida's black schools and athletes in the 1950s and '60s.

February 12, 2006|By Josh Robbins, Sentinel Staff Writer

EUSTIS -- Wilts C. Alexander Jr. crisscrossed the state of Florida by car. He always had another game to attend, another tournament to organize or another meeting to lead.

Sometimes, as he traveled late at night, Alexander's anger over segregation spilled over. He had seen black children playing sports at second-rate facilities and carrying hand-me-down books that white school districts had discarded.

"We're going to make this better," Alexander would tell his nephew Albert, who occasionally drove on those trips.

Alexander wanted to help, as he often said, "the boys and girls."

And he did.

From 1949 to 1968, perhaps no Floridian did more to help young black athletes than Alexander, who worked in Orlando and lived in Eustis.

"He was, to me, some kind of angel," Albert A. Alexander says now. "He was a crusader, an advocate -- all of these things together."

While the state's white schools had the Florida High School Activities Association to govern their sports, black schools fended for themselves.

Their answer was the Florida Interscholastic Athletic Association, and their leader was Wilts C. Alexander Jr.

As executive secretary, Alexander transformed the FIAA from a disorganized jumble into a unified organization.

He enforced its rules. He trained referees. He settled disputes. He ran state-championship tournaments and meets. During his tenure, the FIAA built a central headquarters in Orlando at the corner of South Westmoreland Drive and Conley Street.

"He was a short man in stature, but when he spoke, you listened to him," says former Miami Northwestern High track coach Louie Bing Jr. "He had the authority in the black association."

Today, however, Alexander is a forgotten figure.

He died in November 1988, after suffering from Alzheimer's disease. His family thinks he was 85 years old.

Many of his contemporaries since have died, too.

But his legacy lives on.

Pro Football Hall of Fame member Deacon Jones, Olympic gold-medal sprinter and Dallas Cowboys receiver Bob Hayes and major-league all-star pitcher Jim "Mudcat" Grant got their starts in the FIAA, as did hundreds of other children.

"We would never have had a Bob Hayes, who became an international figure, had it not been for the Florida Interscholastic Athletic Association," says Earl Kitchings Sr., who coached Hayes at Matthew W. Gilbert High in Jacksonville and also headed Florida's black coaches association for 10 years.

"It was Wilts' legacy that he played a tremendous role in helping these schools develop these athletes."

Alexander was only 5 feet 6 and, generally, a quiet man.

But he had a strong will.

James Corbin, Alexander's brother-in-law and former chairman of Florida A&M University's board of trustees, remembers how Alexander once defied the state's white superintendent of public instruction.

The superintendent was upset that the FIAA had scheduled an event in the same city and on the same dates as an FHSAA event.

"They proposed to him that he change the dates," Corbin says. "He refused. During that time, you just wouldn't tell influential white people no. You just didn't do it.

"It sounds like nothing now, but that was a very courageous thing to do."

Alexander had challenged the white establishment before.

In the 1930s and early '40s, he had been a teacher and principal at black schools in Marion County, but he was fired by the school board after he joined a lawsuit that sought equal salaries for black teachers and administrators as those of their white counterparts.

Alexander went on to work for the Central Life Insurance Company in Orlando as a district manager.

He kept his insurance job when he became the FIAA's first executive secretary in 1949. For the next three years, he worked two full-time jobs, even though the FIAA had no money to pay him, according to The History of the Florida Interscholastic Athletic Association, 1932-1968, a book published in 1982.

In 1952, Alexander stayed with the FIAA when the insurance company told him he would have to accept a transfer to Miami or quit.

He had found his calling.

Says his son Wilts C. Alexander III, who lives in Tavares: "His hobby was his work. Talking to people. Meeting people. Presenting things about what he was doing with the association. Talking to the athletes."

Alexander was the FIAA's only full-time officer. He handled all of the organization's day-to-day affairs for its 150 or so schools.

"It was a challenge every morning you woke up," Alexander said in a 1977 interview with the Orlando Sentinel's Lake County edition. "Trying to handle that many schools, you had a job in front of you."

It was tough enough just to enforce the rules.

When he started with the FIAA, the rules for age limits, school attendance and eligibility often weren't followed.

So, Alexander enforced the rules himself.

"He was a good administrator, and he was firm," says T.H. Poole, who coached football at Eustis Vocational Training School and Charles R. Drew High in Winter Garden in the 1950s and '60s.